


Power of Three

by Sholio



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Getting Together, Multi, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-02-16 00:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13042617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: After the events of autumn 1984, people in Hawkins begin to find strange marks on their bodies. More weirdness in Hawkins, must be Tuesday, but Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve find that destiny isn't done with them yet.





	Power of Three

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



The mark appears on the inside of Nancy's wrist, a few days after Christmas 1984. She assumes at first that it's an allergic reaction to something, maybe to her watch band. It itches like a mosquito bite and starts out looking like a rough, red patch of skin, but starts to darken over the next few hours, becoming more distinct: it's a _shape_ , a bar down the center with something spiky and thorny curving around it, like a tattoo or ... or an occult symbol or she doesn't even know what. It reminds her a little of a caduceus without the wings, and it's slanted the exact same way as the scar on her palm.

She doesn't want to admit, even to herself, the awful possibilities spinning around in her head. She takes a very long shower, long enough for Mike to start pounding on the door demanding bathroom access, and she keeps stepping out of the shower to look at herself in the mirror, turning around and around, examining her body for more marks. There's nothing; it's just her body, her normal body, with all its normal freckles and moles.

In a world where demogorgon larvae can grow inside a human body, where vines can come to life and try to eat her brother, where a malevolent alien intelligence can look out through Will's eyes, she doesn't trust strange marks on her body, doesn't trust them at all.

When she's out of the shower, she calls Jonathan's house, shivering in her bathrobe with her hair wrapped in a towel. Jonathan picks up, responds instantly to the alarm in her tone.

"Are you okay? Nancy?"

"I ... I need you to come over," she says, her hand twisted in the robe. "It's not ..." She takes a breath, then notices Mike peeping from down the hall; if his ear could grow to twice its normal size, it would have. "Scram, nerd! I'm on the phone!" The break gives her a chance to notice how alarmed Jonathan sounds, which makes her realize that, after all they've been through, he's probably imagining things far worse than a rash on her wrist. "We're not in danger," she promises, hoping it's true. "It's not the kids. It's just ... I need to talk to you about something, okay? It has to do with ..." She glances down the hallway. "The other place."

"Okay," he says immediately. "Okay, I'll have to bring Will, because Mom's at work, but I'll be over as soon as I can, all right?"

She hangs up the phone feeling guilty for dragging him out of the house, and at the same time, massively relieved at the idea of having him here to help her deal with it. As she paces, throwing on clothes (because she knows for a fact that her mom isn't going to want Jonathan hanging around if she's only wearing her bathrobe), she finds herself wishing that ... well ...

She wishes Steve were here. Wishes he was still someone she could call. It's not like Steve would know anything more about the mark on her wrist than she does, or Jonathan does, but he's just so ... _stable._ So good to hold onto, when she feels like this.

He isn't enough. Wasn't enough. _They_ weren't enough. But then, she wasn't enough for herself then, either.

Jonathan will be here any minute, so she goes downstairs to try to sell her mom on a story about having a project due tomorrow that she and Jonathan are working on, and she forgot, and Jonathan's mom isn't home so she thought maybe he could come over and work on the project together ...?

"Nancy, honey," her mother says, elbow-deep in the evening dishes, "if you want to spend some time with your boyfriend, I'm not going to say no if you just tell me the truth rather than trying to spin me a line. I was your age once too, you know."

"I know." Nancy's fists are shoved deep in the sleeves of the heavy, oversized sweater she's put on, and the mark is hidden under her watch band but she can still feel it itching. "I just didn't want to wait 'til tomorrow to see him, and his mom isn't home. I didn't think you'd want me to go over there without his mom around."

"No, you're right about that," her mother says, and just then the doorbell rings, so Nancy dashes off to bundle Jonathan and Will inside. Mike is happy to see his friend and hustles Will down to the basement for nerd talk, while Nancy runs upstairs with Jonathan.

"Keep the door open!" her mother calls up the stairs.

"I will!" Nancy calls downstairs, and as soon as they're in her room, promptly shuts the door behind them, though she leaves it a few inches open for technical compliance with house rules. She goes to put on a record -- it doesn't really matter what, it just needs to be loud.

"I'm guessing you didn't call me up here just to piss off your mom," Jonathan says, sitting on her bed with a certain amount of awkwardness that she finds completely endearing despite her suppressed panic.

"Not what you're thinking, probably." Sitting beside him, she undoes her watch and holds her arm out. "What do you think of this? It's like ... a rash, I guess? Do you think it has something to do with --" She hesitates; she doesn't even want to speak aloud some of the things she's thought about, the awful possibilities she's imagined.

Jonathan looks at her for a moment. Then he undoes _his_ watch band and holds his arm out wordlessly. There on his wrist: an identical mark.

"Oh." The word falls out of her mouth; it's all she can say. She takes Jonathan's hand gently in hers, turning it toward the light. The symbol, scar, whatever it is ... it's a little darker than hers, but just the same as hers, a caduceus-like thing a couple inches long, a staff or bar twined in something spiky that might be barbed wire or rosebushes.

"I noticed it a couple of days ago," Jonathan says quietly.

"Mine is new. Did yours itch?"

"A little bit. It stopped in a day or so." Jonathan takes a breath, starts to speak, stops and starts again. "You have to promise not to tell anyone this next part, okay?"

"Of course I won't."

He glances at the door, leans closer and says, beneath the peppy beat of The Cars, "Mom has one too. Not quite like this."

Her heart sinks. It's got to have something to do with that night at the cabin, that black thing that poured out of Will -- it left something behind. "What does your mom's look like?"

"It's on her shoulder. It's basically just a little square. She thought it was a bruise but it, uh ... it didn't go away, and we talked about it a little bit. I haven't told her about this yet."

"What about Will?"

Jonathan shakes his head. "I asked him. And helped him look. There isn't anything, at least not that we can find."

"Well, I guess that's ..." she begins, but just then the boys burst into her room through the partly open door.

"Jonathan!" Will bursts out, just Mike piles onto him, snapping, "Will! You _promised!_ You said you wouldn't tell!"

"Yeah, but Jonathan has it too!" Will protests, pushing his bigger friend off him.

"Whoa, hey." Jonathan gets an arm around Mike, pulling him off Will. "What's going on?"

"That's what I'd like to know," Nancy's mom says from the doorway, and there's a guilty scramble. Nancy yanks her watch into place over her wrist. "Kids, you're being way too loud for after nine on a schoolnight. Holly's already asleep and ..." A weary look creeps into her eyes. "So is your father. Ten more minutes and then I want you in your room doing those workbooks, Mike. Nancy, turn that music down."

Nancy complies, and Mike pushes the door shut again. "You're a _jerk,"_ he tells Will. "You _promised."_

"I know, but ... Jonathan, just show him?" And Will looks very pointedly at Jonathan's wrist.

Jonathan grimaces. Slowly, he pushes up his watch band, and Mike's eyes go round.

What the hell. "Me too," Nancy says, and shows the boys her wrist. Now Will's eyes get big too.

"It's just like Jonathan's," he squeaks. "Mike, just like yours is --"

"Shut _up,_ man!"

"Just show us," Nancy says in her best big-sister voice.

Mike looks very put-upon and shows them his wrist. The letters are tattooed neatly in a line: 011.

 

*

 

None of them know it yet, but it turns out that this time, they're not the only ones this is happening to.

The whole town of Hawkins has broken out in an epidemic of symbols.

 

*

 

It takes Steve a long time to work up the nerve to ask Nancy.

By the time he does, the whole school is obsessed with those weird little tattoo-marks that some four in five of the students have now. Steve keeps his covered up. He doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to think about what it means. But he does keep thinking about Nancy.

They're kind of friends now. Actually, he and _Jonathan_ are kind of friends now, which is something he never saw coming. They eat lunch together sometimes, and he's been seeing Jonathan quite a bit when he drops off Dustin for the kids' game nights. And also ... there are other things, too. They've all taken it upon themselves, informal-like, to keep an eye out for weird stuff. And they have regular get-togethers at Mrs. Byers' house to talk about that. The Chief is usually there too. So yeah, that's a thing.

And Steve _likes_ Jonathan, he really does. It's not like he can't see what Nancy sees in the guy. Jonathan is smart and kind and really sort of adorable with those floppy bangs. He let Steve borrow some of his records, and he's just kind of ... nice to Steve, in an oddly soft and gentle way that Steve knows should feel like pity, but somehow it doesn't.

So yeah, Steve likes Jonathan more than he wants to talk about, he really doesn't want to hurt Jonathan, but Nancy ... he'll never stop feeling the way he does about Nancy. Which is why he really needs to know.

He can't ask her with Jonathan around, and it takes forever before he manages to get her alone. He and Nancy might be friends again, kind of, but they don't really do things alone anymore. But there's a moment at the Wheelers' when the kids are wrapping things up in the basement and Jonathan's not here to pick up Will yet, and it's just him and Nancy in the hallway (and he can't think about, won't think about how this house once felt so welcoming, and now he feels like a stranger, even though Mrs. Wheeler is still fairly nice to him).

"You okay?" Nancy asks him, looking up with those big eyes that he'll never stop wanting to fall into.

But that's not something he can do anymore, so he looks away. "Yeah," he says, and then instead of what he meant to ask her, what comes out is, "So, is Jonathan's mom actually dating the Chief, or what?"

Nancy gives one of those snorted little laughs he loves so much. "I don't know. I guess."

"Do they have matching ..." He makes a vague gesture at the general vicinity of his arm.

"No, the Chief doesn't have one at all. They're going for it anyway. Life is short, Mrs. Byers says. Jonathan says the mark that's on his mom's shoulder is probably a Rubik's cube, for Bob." Sorrow passes across her face, a shadow like a rain cloud.

"But you don't believe in that, do you?" Steve asks, almost fiercely. "That it's some kind of ... of _fate_ or something. C'mon, Nance, you were always the sensible one."

"I don't know." She plucks at her watch band. "No, I don't think it's fate, but I do think there's got to be _some_ significance to it, and to why certain people have matching ones. We just don't understand it yet. The scientists are working on it."

Yeah, does he ever know _that._ The town's been crawling with them. So far there's not much for them to report on, though, just inconsequential little tattoo-like marks on people's hands, arms, necks, thighs.

Wrists. 

He looks down at Nancy's wrist again. The place where she's plucking at the watch band, it's so much like -- it _could_ be --

"Do you --" he begins, and pauses. Starts over. "Do you and Jonathan -- do yours --"

He stops because of her grin, that quick flash of a smile, fading to a look that's desperately apologetic. "Yes," she whispers. "Yes, ours are the same."

Steve tries not to feel as if he's just had his heart cored out. Of _course_ they match; why would he think any different? And he doesn't want Jonathan to be left out in the cold. He wants Jonathan to be happy, too. It's just, for a little while, he'd hoped ...

He's glad she doesn't try to show him her mark. Spares him that, at least. He's not sure what it would be, for the two of them. A little camera or a gun or God knows what.

"What about you?" Nancy asks, still with that soft, apologetic look. "Do you have one yet?"

"No," he lies, and walks out into the night for the cold drive home.

 

*

 

Nancy wonders, sometimes, why she can't just be happy.

She had a boyfriend who was sweet and kind and affectionate and loved her like the moon. And she ... she was angry and bitter and consumed with guilt, and tried to twist herself into a shape that didn't fit her, and then blamed him when she broke her bones trying to make herself fit.

(She knows that wasn't exactly how it went; it's part of the truth but not the whole truth. She knows that, but it doesn't help, sometimes.)

And now she has a boyfriend who is sweet and smart and gentle, who loves her like the sun, who's been through the same things she has, who has a mark on his wrist that matches hers. According to Hawkins' newfound mythology, that means he fits with her.

.... Never mind about the people who don't fit, like Max and Lucas, whose marks don't match but who are dating anyway. Or Will, who still doesn't have one. Or her parents, whose marks don't match either, even though she knows she isn't supposed to know that (but she isn't deaf, she's heard the whispered arguments late at night).

And Steve ...

Steve.

It isn't fair to Jonathan. She should just be happy. Why can't she be happy? Why wasn't she happy with Steve? She thought they just didn't _fit_ , that she couldn't stop thinking about Jonathan when she was with Steve because Jonathan was the one she really loved. But now that she's with Jonathan, she can't stop thinking about _Steve_. She wishes it didn't hurt so much to see him alone in the hallway, and she wonders if Steve not having a mark (yet?) means he'll be alone forever. They eat together sometimes in the cafeteria, the three of them, and it's ... it's nice, it's comfortable in a way that worries her, making her worry that she made the wrong decision. But she knows she loves Jonathan. And the symbols on their wrists confirm it, in some weird metaphysical way she both does and doesn't believe in.

She always felt like there was something missing when she was with Steve, and now she feels the same way with Jonathan, making her worry that the real problem is something broken in her. Did she inherit it from her mother? Karen Wheeler learned how to settle for something that wasn't exactly what she wanted, learned to be happy anyway. Is never feeling satisfied the price of being unwilling to settle?

If nothing else, it proves that the marks on their wrists are nothing to do with fate. It doesn't mean that she and Jonathan are some kind of soulmates. She wouldn't feel this feeling of _something missing_ with a soulmate. There is a scientific explanation for those marks; they just don't know it yet.

She carried the torch of justice burning like a brand, and scorched a clear path to a solution for Barb's parents. She burned Will to get the mindflayer out of him. But there is no way to cut her way to the heart of this problem. She can't find happiness by holding herself at gunpoint.

Maybe you just have to learn to live with imperfect things in this world.

 

*

 

The funny thing is that Jonathan thinks about Steve more now than he did when Nancy was actually dating him.

Back when Nancy was dating Steve, Jonathan's thoughts on Steve were mostly a snarl of resentment and jealousy, punctuated by a certain amount of "I can't believe she's dating HIM" when Steve did something particularly stereotypically jock-ish. But now there are too many vectors connecting them to ever be truly free of each other (Nancy, the kids, school, the Upside Down and their shared need to make sure that nothing else dangerous ever comes out of that place to threaten the town). They cross paths a dozen times a week; they sometimes sit together at lunch even when Nancy's somewhere else.

Nancy is smart and she has a good heart, but his mom is both of those things and she still fell for his dad at some point along the way. Jonathan's too cynical about that kind of thing to believe that Steve is worth loving just because Nancy loved him. 

But the thing is, Jonathan _can_ see why Nancy loved him. Steve is wonderful with the kids, and it's clear that all of them adore him. He's brave, and he's loyal, and worse than all of that, he's possibly more willing to _try_ than any person Jonathan's ever met. Steve tries even at things he's not good at, and that ... that's what makes Jonathan feel inadequate in a way that frustrates him to no end. He's spent his life building up an immunity to people like Steve. So what if he doesn't have the fucking muscles or the stupid perfect hair. Society values those things; Jonathan doesn't. When people trying to make him feel like he's _less_ because he's not good at sports or because he doesn't enjoy popular music, he just doubles down on it.

But Steve _tries_ , he really does -- the way he put himself between the kids and danger, the way he's trying now to be friends with Nancy, the effort so painfully transparent that it makes Jonathan ache to look at him. Seeing the way Steve does that ... it makes Jonathan think about the jock parts of him in a whole different way. It makes him wonder whether Steve has deliberately suppressed his shyer, dorkier side, the side of him that Jonathan glimpses occasionally with the kids. Steve is good at being a jock not so much because of natural advantages as because there's some part of him that just _never gives up,_ some part of him that decided a long time ago that he wanted to be liked and admired, and just set out to accomplish it. What fucking kills Jonathan is how much he admires _that_ , even if he doesn't like the direction Steve pointed it in. And he's aware of what a tiny step it is, from where he is now, to falling headlong into having all kinds of stupid warm feelings for stupid, stupid Steve Harrington.

Which means changing his entire perception of himself, and of the kind of people that he, well. Likes.

What really frustrates the absolute hell out of him is that Steve already did it first; somehow he managed to do that complete rearranging of his self-image and come out with a win.

(If you can call the fact that most of Steve's old friends don't talk to him, most of his new friends are middle schoolers, and Steve walked around for two months with bruises on his face a _win._ )

The point is, Steve has successfully managed to do something that scares the hell out of Jonathan, and he's not about to let Steve be the bigger person here, but he's always built himself up in the face of his classmates' scorn on a bedrock certainty that at least he knows who he is, _what_ he is.

And there's also the risk that spending too much time around Steve will remind Nancy that she'd rather be with handsome, charismatic Steve Harrington again, rather than weird loner Jonathan Byers. He knows it's unfair to Nancy to even think that way, and hates himself for it, but, well. A lifetime of rejection has taught him otherwise.

He wants to believe the mark on his wrist means that there's something between him and Nancy that can't be broken, even more than the scars on their palms. But to trust in that, he's going to have to ...

Change.

And that's harder than fighting a whole goddamn pack of demogorgons.

 

*

 

Dustin is playing with the mark on his arm again, running his finger around and around it, creasing the skin with his fingernail --

"Hey," Steve says, and Dustin looks up with a guilty jerk. "You're going to make a hole."

Dustin looks back down at his arm, even more guiltily. 

They're at Steve's house, even though Steve's parents are out of town. Steve has a cool house and doesn't mind if Dustin sprawls all over the furniture, and Steve puts out snacks and orders them pizza. Steve's watching football on TV while Dustin has a book on reptiles open on the floor and is draped over an armchair, head down, reading it. Steve has earnestly tried explaining football, and Dustin sort of gets it, but he'd rather read the book and just make halfhearted cheering noises when Steve reacts to something on the screen. Steve doesn't mind; they do this a lot.

Dustin presses at the mark on his arm with his thumb. It's a circle, like a wreath or a ring of stars. Nobody in his group of friends has one even remotely like it. At least he's not like Will, who doesn't have one (yet?), though Dustin's mom doesn't either. And Steve, apparently.

"Dude," Steve says, flopping his head on the back of the couch before twisting to look at Dustin. "It doesn't mean anything, I mean, unless you want it to."

"Easy for you to say," Dustin mutters.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, you haven't got one, do you?"

"Sure I do," Steve says.

Dustin thrashes around until he manages to sit up. "Really? I thought -- hey, let me see it."

"No," Steve says flatly. He reaches for another slice of pizza and turns up the TV.

"Is it somewhere embarrassing? Is it on your butt?"

"No. Jesus."

"Someone in this town must have one on their butt. Stands to reason. ... Is it shaped like a dick?"

"You're so full of it," Steve says, flopping on the couch and stuffing half a piece of pizza into his mouth.

"C'mon, you can't just tell me after all this time and not show me. Come on. Come _on."_

"Fine." Steve sits up and pulls up his watch band. He holds out his hand for a quarter of a second, before jerking it away. "There you go. Pretty boring, huh?"

"I couldn't even see!"

"It's just a thing," Steve says, stuffing the rest of the pizza in his mouth. Indistinctly around it, he mumbles, "Nancy and Jonathan have matching ones, and so do Eleven, I mean Jane, and Mike --"

"I know, God, Mike never shuts up about it --"

"-- but that doesn't mean it's like a, a life sentence, right? I mean, look at Max and Lucas. _They_ don't care. And Mrs. Byers, if she's dating Chief Hopper now --"

There's a brief silence as they reflect on the way both of Mrs. Byers' previous relationships went.

"Okay, maybe not the best example," Steve says quickly. "Anyway, my point is, there's like a million roads to enlightenment, right, dude? And your path is the -- uh -- road less traveled, because all roads lead to Rome and -- this metaphor got away from me, a little bit, but I think you know what I mean?"

"No," Dustin says. "I have no idea what you mean." He smacks a hand down on the pizza box. "Dibs on the last slice."

"You suck, dude," Steve says, visibly relieved to have escaped from any and all discussions of magic tattoos or their significance thereof.

Dustin flops down in front of the coffee table and Steve doesn't say anything (or notice, even) if Dustin gets some cheese on the carpet. And Steve's happy to explain the next play in the game on the TV. Dustin is, reluctantly, against his will, getting sucked into football. Steve is as endlessly patient about explaining it as he was when he did Dustin's hair for the Snow Ball, and there's just something kind of fascinating about knowing what's happening when all those little guys in their colorful jerseys run around on the field.

Somewhere in the middle of explaining the difference between a bootleg play and a quarterback sneak, Steve reaches out a pizza-greasy hand and ruffles Dustin's hair. 

"Don't worry about marks on your arm, or horoscopes, or anything people say about finding the right person, okay?" Steve says. "You're awesome, dude. You're gonna find somebody who sees that, one of these days, no matter what they have on their arm. And 'til you do, just go on and be your super rad self. Okay?"

"Okay, fine, stop messing with the hair, man," Dustin says. But he peels himself off the carpet and sits with his back against the couch for awhile, and Steve gives him a one-armed hug and tries to steal what's left of his pizza.

Dustin isn't really sure why Nancy wants to date Jonathan anyway. Oh, sure, Will's big brother is pretty nice and all. But he's not _Steve._ Even if Nancy doesn't have a mark on her arm that matches Steve's, how can she not notice how awesome Steve is?

 

*

 

Nancy is one of the first to discover that the mysterious marks aren't just a romantic version of Go Fish.

It's a typical Sunday night, and she's flopped on her bed doing a practice quiz for Monday's Latin test when a rush of something that's not quite fear, more like urgency, pours through her entire body.

She's sitting up before she knows it. She wouldn't be surprised if her hair was standing on end. She knows what an adrenaline jolt feels like by now (doesn't she ever) and _that's_ how she feels, her heart racing and her whole body quivering with the urgent need to ... go somewhere.

She's already halfway out the window before she stops to wonder what on Earth she's doing. She doesn't even know where she's going. All she knows is that she has to get there.

She crawls back into her room, grabs a sweater, and runs to tap on Mike's door. He's on his bed with the walkie-talkie, which probably means he's talking to El, and he gives her a deeply annoyed look.

"Mike, I just need to borrow your bike really quick. Can I?"

"What do you need my bike for? Don't you have one?"

"Mom sold it at the garage sale last summer because I never used it anymore, remember?" The sense of urgency is still tugging at her; she gives up the urge to stand still and calls over her shoulder, "I'm taking it! I'll bring it back!"

"You better not scratch it!" Mike yells after her.

Minutes later, she's peeling out of the driveway on a boy's bike that's adjusted for legs a little longer than hers -- when did Mike get so stupidly _tall,_ anyway? She hasn't been on a bike in years, but apparently it's true what they say; you don't forget. She pedals madly down the street, hardly thinking, just following that frantic tugging, and doesn't realize where she's going until she's turned down the shortcut through the woods, off the street that the kids call Mirkwood.

She's going to Jonathan's house.

She skids to a halt in the Byers' gravel driveway, just as another vehicle pulls in behind her, headlights raking across her. There's some kind of altercation happening on the porch, with people yelling and a lot of arm-waving. She recognizes Joyce and Jonathan, and she's never seen Jonathan's dad before, but she guesses that's who the third person is. Joyce is holding a claw hammer in one hand.

Nancy drops the bike and runs up to the porch.

"-- and if you ever lay a hand on one of my boys again --" Joyce is screaming.

"I didn't even hurt him! What, a man can't discipline his own kids now?"

Nancy hears a car door slam, but she doesn't know who it is, doesn't dare look around to find out, until there's movement beside her and she realizes Steve has joined them on the porch, gripping the nail-studded bat in both hands. She's not sure why he's here now -- for that matter, she's not sure why _she's_ here now -- but she's never been so glad to see that nailbat.

Lonnie Byers is just staring in disbelief now at all of them arrayed against him: Joyce with that hammer gripped in her fist, Jonathan looking like he's one step from throwing an actual punch, Steve with the bat, Nancy armed with nothing except fury (and feeling, right now, like that's enough). 

"Jesus," Lonnie says.

And that's when red and blue lights strobe across everything and Chief Hopper's Blazer pulls in behind the other vehicles.

"Jesus," Lonnie says again. "You called the fucking cops, Joyce? Really?"

"No," Joyce says. "Not me."

Hopper takes the porch steps two at a time. "Hell's goin' on here?" he demands, head down and shoulders hunched like a bull, looking like he's in a mood to ram his way through a concrete wall. "Thought you were up in Indianapolis, Byers."

"I came back to pick up a few things," Lonnie says. He's got his back against the wall of the house, and looks like he'd back up another step or twenty if he could. "This wasn't supposed to turn into some kind of federal case. Jesus Christ."

"He hit Will," Jonathan says, and Nancy laces her fingers through his cold, shaking ones.

"And he took a swing at Jonathan when he got in between." Joyce points the claw hammer at Lonnie, hardly seeming to notice when Hopper wraps his hand around hers and takes it away from her, muttering something about assault with a deadly weapon. "Get off my porch, Lonnie. Get the hell off my porch!"

"Do it," Hopper tells him. One hand goes to the butt of his gun. He's still holding the hammer, its head in his palm and the handle dangling loosely between his thick fingers, with a general sense that he could flip it around at any moment. "Unless you want me to run you in for assault."

"It's not assault if a man takes the back of his hand to his own goddamn kids, asshole," Lonnie tells him.

Nancy feels Jonathan jerk forward. She keeps hold of him. She is aware of Steve on Jonathan's other side, the bat clutched in his hands.

Hopper looks less angry than tired, but the sense of menace still radiates off him. "Lonnie. Get in your car and go. Else you get to spend the night cooling your heels in jail. You want to give me all that time to chat with the Indianapolis cops and see how many rocks I can turn over?"

"How'm I supposed to get out of here when you're blocking me in, pig?"

"Right." Hopper glances at his Blazer parked behind the other cars, engine still running, red and blue lights stroking the lawn. "Let's take a walk, then."

He looks around for a place to put the hammer, and then shoves it into Nancy's hand. She takes it, not quite sure how she feels about its sudden heft. She can see why Joyce picked it up as a weapon. It's weighted like one.

The four of them stand and watch Hopper march Lonnie to the cars, leaning close, talking to him -- they can't hear the words. Then Joyce sags, and Jonathan pulls quickly away from Nancy and puts his arm around her.

"Will," she begins. 

"Yeah," Jonathan says, his voice cracking, and they push their way through the half-open door into the house. Nancy and Steve trail in awkwardly behind them.

The house is a mess again, furniture tipped over, things knocked off shelves. Will is sitting in a huddle on the couch. He looks like he's been crying, but he doesn't look hurt. Joyce and Jonathan make for him like twin arrows, dropping down one on each side of him. And Nancy stands there, wishing she didn't feel excluded. Joyce has never been anything less than welcoming, but at times like this she's reminded that the Byers family comes as a unit, and they're not always able to open up wide enough to let someone else in.

"Hey," Steve says softly. He nudges her arm. It might be the first time he's touched her since they broke up. "C'mon. Let's make some coffee or something."

It's weird how well Steve seems to know his way around the Byers kitchen. Nancy's not sure if she wants to be reminded of how entangled they've all become in each other's lives. But it's comfortable to be with him like this, settling into sync, Steve measuring out coffee while Nancy gets out mugs.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" she asks him.

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean, why'd you just happen to be ..." She shrugs. She's not really sure what she's asking, to be honest. 

"I had to return some records I borrowed," Steve says, a little too quickly. "How about you?"

"I don't know," Nancy says honestly, and just then the door slams as Hopper comes in.

Steve and Nancy both pop up in the kitchen doorway as Hopper goes over to sit next to Joyce Byers on the couch, putting an arm around her. The little knot of tearful Byerses seems to have calmed down a bit, but she still leans into him gratefully.

"Is he gone?" Joyce asks quietly.

"He's gone. We had a talk first." He pulls back and looks her carefully in the face. "You wanna press charges? He hurt you?"

"No, God, no," she says quickly. "Lonnie's not -- like _that._ It was never like that."

"If you say so." Hopper turns to look at the boys beside her on the couch. "You okay, kids?" he asks, and there are two nods. "Okay, so, what happened exactly?"

Jonathan's the one who speaks up. "He came over to get some stuff and things just went to hell, like usual." He's huddled into himself like he wants to disappear, and Nancy leaves Steve's side -- she feels weirdly guilty about that for some reason -- and goes to sit next to Jonathan on the couch, taking his hand.

"I shouldn't have --" Will begins.

"No!" both the older Byerses yelp in unison.

"You didn't do anything wrong," Joyce tells him fiercely. "Neither of you did anything wrong. Lonnie spent the evening here," she explains to Hopper. "It's rare enough that he wants to spend time with the boys. He had a few drinks. I should have known better. -- but how did _you_ know to come?"

"Call it a sixth sense," Hopper says.

There's a soft clunk as Steve trips over something in the mess, heading for the door. "Sorry," he babbles, catching a lamp he almost knocked over. "Sorry, I -- look, I gotta go. Homework. Late, right? Catch you all later."

He's out the door before Nancy can find out if Mrs. Byers -- or Jonathan -- would have asked him to stay.

It's some time later -- when they're watching late-night TV with cups of coffee for the adults and cocoa for the kids, she and Jonathan huddled together under a blanket, Mrs. Byers on the phone to Nancy's mom to explain that Jonathan realized they had a last-minute group project and she'll drive Nancy over in an hour, _promise_ \-- only then, she realizes that she never saw any sign of the records Steve supposedly came over to return.

Well. It was a hell of a night. People forget things.

 

*

 

"Do these marks, do they give you some kind of superpowers or something?"

Jim looks up from the report he's laboriously typing out, and stares at the Harrington kid who has, for some reason, materialized in the doorway of his office. "What now?"

"The marks." Steve touches his watch band, which gives Jim an idea of where the mark on _him_ is. "Do they ... can you tell when people are in trouble? Is that what they do?"

Jim shrugs and goes back to typing.

"No, seriously." Steve sits down across from him. "C'mon, man. Don't tell me it's a coincidence, all of us showing up at Mrs. Byers' house the other night. You felt the same thing, right? Like there was something really bad happening and you had to get to wherever it was?"

Jim takes a deep breath, pushes his chair back, and reaches for his coffee cup. "I don't know what it is."

"But you felt it too, right?"

He sets his elbows on his desk and stares at the kid who looks -- scared, hopeful, desperate. "Yeah," he says. "I felt it," and sees some of the tension go out of Steve.

"I'm not going nuts, then," Steve says in a voice that's half sigh of relief.

Jim snorts a half-laugh. "Kid, I live with a girl who blew out most of the windows in my cabin with her mind. We all almost got killed last year by a bunch of things that look like they escaped from a horror movie. I think sanity left the building a long time ago."

Steve blows out a breath in a laugh of his own, and then looks up quickly. "Nancy said you didn't have one of the marks. Uh, was she wrong?"

Now it's Jim's turn to hesitate. He should be having this conversation with Joyce, not with a nosy 18-year-old. He thinks about just not answering; then he thinks about Steve turning up on Joyce's porch too, thinks about the kid's half-plaintive, half-relieved _I'm not going nuts, then ..._

"I didn't," Jim says. "Nancy's not wrong. I do now, that's all."

It had come up slowly, and took its own time about it. Maybe different people got them differently. Joyce said hers had itched. His hadn't. It just emerged gradually, over the course of a few weeks, on his shoulder right in the same place as Joyce's, matching hers.

Joyce thinks the one she has is a Rubik's Cube for Bob Newby. Jim figures it makes about as much sense as anything else does. So why the hell _he_ has one now, a matching one, he has no idea, any more than he knows why he had to get to Joyce's place the night Lonnie showed up.

Steve is still looking at him like he has all the answers, making Jim feel about a million years old. Steve's at that awkward age when he's right on the edge of adulthood, but keeps looking to the adults to have all the answers. Jim remembers being that age. Then they put a gun in his hands and sent him off to 'Nam. That'll grow you up fast.

But he wishes he has the answers Steve is looking for. He really does.

"I don't know any more about it than you do," Jim tells him. "The other night is the first time it's ever happened to me. Hell, as a cop, it'd be handy if I _did_ have some kinda sixth sense for people in trouble. But the other night with Joyce, that's it. So you got it too, huh?"

Steve nods.

"Gonna ask those scientist guys?"

"No," Steve says. "You?"

Jim feels the corner of his mouth twitch. "No."

Steve nods, gets up, turns to leave.

"Hey," Jim says. "Kid."

Steve looks over his shoulder. He's eighteen, Jim thinks. Not really a kid anymore. If the country was still like it was fifteen years ago, he'd be old enough to be drafted.

"You got plans after you graduate yet?" Jim asks.

Steve looks instantly on edge. "Why?"

"We might be hiring. If you wanted to stay in town." Jim taps his fingers on his desk. He wants a smoke, but he's been trying to cut back. "I could use someone else on this force who I don't have to make up stories for, when things go sideways. And --" He pauses again.

"And what?" Steve says, looking even tenser. "It's not over, is it? There are still things around, aren't there?"

"A few things," Jim says quietly. "Not your problem. Not unless you want it to be."

There's a part of him that feels so goddamn guilty about this. Every last one of these kids deserves to go out there and live their life without having this town drag them back. But he can't do it all on his own.

And he's gotten the feeling for awhile now that, left to his own devices, Steve Harrington is going to waste most of the potential Jim can see in him. Some people are born with enough ambition for ten people, like that Wheeler girl, or Jane. And some people need to be given direction so they don't end up living in a trailer working on a 12-pack-a-day drinking habit. Not that he knows anything about that. He thinks Steve could be a hell of a cop, knows he's never gonna get there without a push; knows equally well that drafting Steve into a war with the supernatural might get him killed.

"Like what sort of things?" Steve says at last, and Jim doesn't know whether to be relieved or cry that he took the bait that fast, that eagerly, like he's just been waiting for someone to give him a chance to do something useful.

"Come out to the cabin this weekend," Jim says. "We'll talk."

Steve hesitates, gives a quick nod, and leaves.

Jim goes back to typing the report. It takes him awhile to think back on the conversation, as he hunts and pecks over the keys, and wonder why he's so sure that he was there at the Byers house because of Joyce. Not for her kids. For Joyce, specifically. 

Maybe it's time to have a chat with Dr. Owens.

 

*

 

For Nancy, it just makes sense to find out everything she can about the marks that everyone in Hawkins is so obsessed with. They seem to be harmless, but they're clearly _weird,_ Hawkins-style weird, and the peculiar urgency that drew her to the Byers house that night has to be connected to it somehow. She didn't used to believe in psychic powers before Eleven, and now that she _does_ believe (not in magic per se, but in not-yet-understood scientific phenomena that mimics it) she wonders if something about the marks could be replicating whatever it was that caused Eleven to turn out the way she is. After all, isn't finding people something Eleven can do?

So she embarks on a fact-finding quest.

The most obvious source of data is the scientists who have been wandering around town for the last month or so, but after the last couple of years, Nancy's distrust of anything establishment-related is starting to go deep. She starts by asking around the high school. She asks all the girls she knows, and has them ask their boyfriends, their little siblings, their parents. She has the kids gather data for her (which they take to like the little spies-in-training that they are; the walkie-talkie conversations go on late into the night).

She finds out a few things:

The statistic reported in the paper, that about 4 in 5 people have the marks, seems to be reasonably accurate. Some people just don't have them, at least not yet. Some people got them early; some got them late (a couple of her informants only had marks show up in the last week or so). Some have marks that match the people they're dating or married to (in _much_ higher proportions than random chance could explain), but others don't. Many of the people Nancy talks to have specific ideas for what their marks are supposed to represent. Nancy tries not to think of the marks' shape as anything other than random, like a birthmark, but even she can't deny that Mike's blotchy but recognizable "011" is unlikely to have happened by pure chance.

And she finds ... outliers. The Robson twins have marks as identical as they are, even though she has yet to find another set of siblings, twin or otherwise, who have matching marks. Brenda Copeland started dating her boyfriend after the whole skin-mark epidemic set in, and they both claim that his mark gradually changed to match hers, even though Nancy can't find another confirmed instance of this. She does, however, discover a few more people who didn't have their marks show up until they started dating someone else, although since the marks seem to emerge on a highly individual timetable, there's no way to be certain that it's related.

Some of the kids at school have started calling them soulmarks. This, Nancy suspects, can be traced back to the 10th grade popular girls' clique, who made a very public bet at Valentine's that anyone whose mark matched their boyfriend's would still be dating a month later, and the rest wouldn't. The scary thing is how many of them won that bet. And now a not-inconsiderable number of kids at school, and Nancy suspects a few teachers as well (based on the gossip and surreptitious soulmark-peeking that she's witnessed on her numerous manufactured errands to quietly observe teachers in the staff room), seem to think that the marks have something to do with _destiny_ and _finding the person you're meant for_. Nancy is almost entirely sure that it's a bunch of garbage. Whatever it means, surely it couldn't mean _that._

But ... there's also that night at the Byers house. And she's had people tell her a few other stories like that. Weird stuff. She might think they were imagining things if she hadn't felt it herself.

She enlists Jonathan's help to take photos of the marks on anyone who will consent to be photographed. She's not sure why; it just seems like it would be good to do a more systematic and scientific analysis, since she can't get access to the scientists' data. The two of them sit in her room under the pretext of working on a class project, arranging the photos into stacks based on where on the body they emerged, because it's not like they can come up with a better classification system: wrist, arm, shoulder, neck, ankle ...

As they work, Nancy rubs at her own mark occasionally. She sometimes feels it ache and she doesn't know why, tells herself it's psychosomatic because she spends so much time thinking about it since she embarked on her project, but there are times, especially late at night, when the pain just feels so real. She's asked some of her informants about it, and a few of them have also mentioned feeling pain in their marks -- after the initial itching died down. Every last one of those who reported pain doesn't have someone else who matches, and Nancy, of course, has Jonathan, who is sitting _right there_. But there is still a faint, distant ache, like the way winter's cold settles deep into the bones. Like there's something tied to her at the wrist, a thin cord, pulling on her veins as it stretches.

She glances up and notices Jonathan pushing up his watch band and rubbing a thumb across his own mark as he shifts photos from one stack to another. "Hurts?" she asks.

"Kind of."

"Mine too."

"Think it means something?"

"I don't know." Nancy holds out her hand, watch band shoved up her arm, and Jonathan lays his arm against hers, wrist to wrist. She wonders if it's just her imagination that she feels a kind of energy when they touch, skin to skin, that eases the hollow pain a little.

But not all the way.

"Are you going out with the Chief this weekend?" she asks, to take her mind off it.

Jonathan pulls his hand back, to her regret. "If I can get that paper finished for World History. Chief Hopper has pretty strict rules on homework and, uh ... extracurricular activities."

"I know," Nancy sighs. "I'm probably not going to be able to go. I have to study for my Chem II test."

What the Chief _doesn't_ seem to do is make special rules for girls, which she feels slightly annoyed about appreciating, but appreciates anyway. His actual rules are draconian enough. He'd originally just enlisted Steve, but the kids found out more or less instantly, and then Nancy went to ask if she could help too, and Jonathan seems to have followed her. They're all under strict rules not to actually try to fight anything. Just document it and get an adult. (Jonathan's camera is especially useful here.)

Because, as the marks demonstrate, the strangeness didn't all go away when the gate closed. So far there hasn't been much in the way of actual, documentable weirdness, but the Chief's already taken care of one immature demogorgon (with Eleven's help) and thinks there might be others. And the vines aren't all gone, and sometimes there are other things, too. The kids swear up and down there's a patch of woods that's honest-to-God haunted. There was a time when Nancy would've rolled her eyes at that, but now, who knows?

They have to keep the town safe. Keep people safe. There's only them to do it.

 

*

 

Jonathan is taking pictures of a dead rabbit in the woods (almost certainly killed by a fox, but he figures the Chief will want to look at it) when he suddenly understands, right down to his core, what Nancy was talking about when she told him what happened to her that night his dad showed up at the house.

Because it's happening to him right now.

He'd swear his hair actually stands on end. It's like fear and yet it isn't, because he can tell -- and now he sees what Nancy meant by that, too -- that it's not _him_ who's in danger.

_Nancy!_

If the other time was Jonathan being in danger, this must be something to do with her. It _has_ to be. She wasn't supposed to be out in the woods tonight, but there's no telling what might have pulled her out of the house -- or maybe it's _at_ her house, where her parents and Mike and baby Holly are.

He takes off running, sick with terror. He can tell where to go: Nancy was right about that, too. It's like he's being pulled in a particular direction, deeper into the woods, stumbling over roots, his flashlight beam dancing wildly across branches turned to monster claws by the play of light and shadow.

 

*

 

This is a really stupid way to die if he actually dies out here, Steve thinks in a wild panic as he scrambles onto the roof of old man Miller's shed, which wobbles dangerously under his weight.

Seconds after his sneakers leave the ground, tooth-filled flower-petal mouths snap shut on thin air and claws scrabble at the sides of the shed.

These immature demodogs are much smaller than Dart was when Steve first saw him, which is the only reason why he's still alive. They're about the size of terriers. But they're horrifically fast and have heads full of teeth -- and damn, the next time he sees Dustin ( _if_ he makes it out of here to see Dustin, but that's loser talk), he's buying the kid a milkshake or something, because Dustin took on one of these things _by himself._

The larval demodogs slobber around the base of the shed, while Steve tries to hold very still as he feels the shed sway under him at every movement. There's a wet scrabbling sound, and he swings the bat down under the edge of the shed roof and feels a solid impact; there's a little squeal and something smacks into a fence post ten feet away. Seconds later he can hear it scuttling back again.

"Oh God, oh God, oh shit, oh God," Steve chants under his breath. There are about a half-dozen of the little bastards, at least. He'd stumbled across a whole nest of them under the raised floor of the Mullers' old chicken coop while he was poking around investigating several missing pet reports in the area. At least the shed was close enough to make it at a sprint, and he'd managed to hang onto the bat. He did, however, lose the walkie-talkie by stupidly trying to get it out of his pocket while he was trying to outrun the pack. Now it's down there somewhere, in the snarling darkness.

He knocks off another mini demodog with the bat. The shed shudders ominously at the abrupt movement.

_I am not going to die being nibbled to death by monsters the size of chickens. That's not what I want my tombstone to read._

Except they're really awful chickens whose heads are made up entirely of teeth. One or two of them, he could've dealt with. But a whole pack like this ... Steve doesn't have an especially vivid imagination, which is a blessing given some of the things he's had to deal with, but even he can imagine all too easily what would happen if he fell into the middle of _that._ He once saw a documentary on TV about piranhas. That's what these things are, extradimensional piranhas with flower-petal heads.

Yelling for help hasn't done anything so far. Either there's nobody home at the Muller place tonight, or old man Muller is so deaf he can't hear Steve screaming from out back of the barn. Steve's still got his flashlight, and he waves it in the air, then covers it up in the pattern the Chief taught them (three short, three long, three short) for SOS. For all the good that'll do. The Chief's all the way on the other side of town tonight, burning out a patch of vines that the kids found out back of the arcade. "Stay near the road and don't get too far away from your car," he'd said. Steve wonders if he can get credit for having done that since he can still _see_ his car -- not more than a hundred and fifty, two hundred yards away. Of course, it's getting there that's the trick.

Maybe he could distract them somehow? Throw the flashlight? Throw the bat? No, he's not giving the bat up right now for love or money. 

Then there's a sudden ... reorientation in the scrambling down below the shed. The latest one that was trying to crawl up to the roof drops off on its own. Steve cautiously leans over the edge to try to figure out what they're up to, shining his flashlight down onto the pack. His first thought is, oh God, there are even more than he thought (eight or nine, at least). And they've all turned and are staring, if "staring" is the right word for something that doesn't have eyes, toward the edge of the woods.

Where Steve can now hear crashing.

Great. He clutches the bat convulsively, the tape-wrapped handle slipping in his sweat-slick palms. He's managed to find something even meaner than a pack of demodogs. This _really_ isn't his night at all.

But he realizes a moment later that the pack doesn't look scared. They look interested. If they had ears, their ears would have perked up.

If they had proper mouths instead of toothy mouth-holes, they'd be slavering.

Steve aims his flashlight at the edge of the woods just as Jonathan Byers, of all people, stumbles out of the woods and stops in shock.

There's a moment when everyone is frozen, including the demodogs. Then the whole pack rushes forward, having found easier prey, and Steve screams, "Get on top of something! Climb! Now!"

Jonathan, the lucky asshole, is close to the barn. He leaps up onto an old hay wagon, then manages to get hold of the edge of the open hayloft and pulls himself up. Steve keeps his flashlight pointed over that way as Jonathan's feet disappear inside the loft and then Jonathan himself reappears, crouching in the opening and looking down at the pack seething over the hay wagon and scrabbling on the walls.

"What the hell!" Jonathan's voice echoes across the pasture. It's not that Steve actually wants him here (he very, very much does _not_ want Jonathan here, under the circumstances) but there's something comforting about Jonathan's tone of mingled disbelief, fear, and "what is my life, even." It reflects Steve's own state of mind almost perfectly.

"See if you can find something to hit them with!" Steve calls across the space between them. "They can climb!"

"Now you tell me!" Jonathan's annoyed voice comes back, and there's some flailing around in the edge of the hayloft. Jonathan kicks one of them off and whacks another with a stick.

"You got a walkie-talkie, right?" Steve yells. "Call for help!"

"I'm busy!" Jonathan yells back, sweeping off two more with his stick.

He's going to be overrun in a minute. Steve has the overlapping edge of the shed's tin roof in his favor, but the barn is easier to climb into. A couple of them are almost managing to jump from the hay wagon; they can throw themselves halfway up the wall.

But they're all over there, not over here ... hmmm. Steve gauges the distance to his car, and how far he's likely to be able to make it before the demodogs notice.

"I'm going to get my car and bring it around, okay?"

"Hurry!" There's a note of panic in Jonathan's voice. One of the demodogs manages to cling to his sneaker with its teeth before he swings his foot around wildly and smacks it against the side of the hayloft.

A few minutes ago, there was nothing Steve wanted more than to get off this shed roof. Now there's nothing he wants more than to stay up here. But not if it means watching Jonathan die in front of him. Not giving himself time to think, he hangs over the edge of the roof and drops to the ground.

The thunk he makes doesn't sound loud, but the pack hears it. Several of them peel off and start for Steve with horrifying speed.

"Steve!" Jonathan yells, sounding panicked.

Steve's not sure if it's a warning or an urgent request for help. All he knows is that he's running for the edge of the overgrown pasture, and his car, faster than he's ever run in his life.

And he knows, glancing back, that it's not fast enough. They're gaining on him rapidly. He might make it to the edge of the pasture before they catch up -- but not all the way to his car.

He should've stayed up on the shed. He would've been safe up there. Relatively speaking.

Yeah, and watch them strip the flesh off Jonathan like the piranhas in that documentary? No way.

At least his epitaph will read _He was killed by chicken-sized monsters while trying to be a hero._ That's a small improvement over the other version ...

If he lets them catch up while he's running, they'll eat the legs right out from under him. Steve turns around, holds the bat in front of him, and prepares to make a stand.

Headlights sweep across him. Steve looks around, startled. There's a car in the pasture, roaring toward him; he's been too preoccupied to have the slightest idea where it came from. It skids to a halt between him and the demodogs. It is, of all things, a station wagon, and that's Nancy leaning over to open the passenger-side door and screaming, "Get in, get in!"

Steve tumbles inside, gouging himself on the nailbat, and Nancy takes off while he's still got one foot on the ground. The station wagon -- her mom's station wagon, to be specific; he recognizes it from when they were dating -- bounces over ruts in the field, rattling Steve's teeth. There's a horrible crunching and popping as Nancy runs over a few demodogs in the process of pulling up under the hayloft.

"Jonathan!" she and Steve yell together, and Nancy adds, "Jump!"

Jonathan jumps, but it's a long way down and he lands badly, his leg going out from under him with a startled, pained yell. Steve is already out of the car, swinging the bat in all directions. There are some more satisfying thumps and squishing sounds, while Nancy hauls Jonathan bodily into the backseat, both of them lashing out wildly, kicking at demodogs snapping at their feet. Steve takes the driver's seat like they'd rehearsed it, throwing the bat into the passenger seat and the car into gear, and spins in a wild turn before roaring off down the field in the direction Nancy came from.

He turns out of the Mullers' driveway and slows down alongside his car, then decides there is _no way_ he's stopping long enough to get the car, not right now. He'll come back for it later.

They're only about a mile or so down the road, though, when the adrenaline crash hits him hard. The car starts to veer, and Steve pulls over to the side and shifts into park with a violently trembling hand. After a moment, he manages to say without his teeth chattering, "Everyone okay back there?"

There's some rustling and affirmative noises. Nancy leans between the seats. "Are you okay? Do you want me to take over driving?"

"I'm fine," Steve says, more roughly than he meant it. "Where to? I guess we need to take your folks' car back, Nance, right?"

"Hopefully nobody even noticed I'm gone. I -- I'm not sure." 

Her hair is almost brushing his cheek. He can smell the faint, floral hint of her shampoo. Steve closes his eyes.

"Let's go to my place first." Jonathan speaks up from the backseat. "Mom'll be in bed and it'll be easier to avoid waking her than your whole household, Nancy. We can get cleaned up and let the Chief know what's going on."

"Casa Byers it is," Steve says, with a lightness he doesn't feel. He slides the car into gear and eases forward.

 

*

 

Nancy can feel the beating of Jonathan's heart where he's pressed up against her. And she knows, now, that it's no coincidence she went to the Byers house at the exact right moment when Lonnie was there. It wasn't paranoia; it wasn't coincidence. Two times, in this case, is more than enough evidence that there really _is_ something that happens to her, now, when Jonathan is in danger. It was the same feeling, the spike of panic and urgency that had her racing downstairs in sock feet, tiptoeing past her dad sleeping in the living room, grabbing her mom's keys from the hook in the kitchen, and effectively stealing the family car.

She finds Jonathan's hand in the dark and laces her fingers through his, scar to scar.

He leans close and whispers, "Thanks for the save. How'd you know to come?"

"Same way as before. When your dad was there."

Jonathan nods. He starts to say something, then falls silent for a moment. Then he asks quietly, "When did you get the feeling?"

"I don't know. How long does it take to drive out here from my house? A few minutes. Maybe ten minutes, tops. I hope you weren't up there for long."

More silence, then he murmurs, "No. Not long."

She's not entirely sure why he's being so odd about it. Maybe the idea of being linked in that way bothers him. Nancy's not sure why it doesn't bother her more. It's weird. Hawkins-weird. But it also feels right.

"We need to see if we can raise the Chief on the walkie-talkies," he adds.

"I don't have mine. Do you have yours?"

Jonathan nods and gets it out. Nancy keeps holding his hand the whole time.

The mark on her wrist doesn't ache at all right now.

 

*

 

Steve pulls into the Byers' driveway and parks behind Mrs. Byers' car. Jonathan's car isn't here -- of course it wouldn't be, if Jonathan was in the woods tonight. They need some kind of duty roster, he thinks, so they'll know who's out on patrol. Right now the Chief keeps it all in his head. 

"Chief Hopper is driving out to handle things at the Muller place," Nancy says as they get out of the car. She and Jonathan are holding hands. It doesn't really hurt, to Steve's mild surprise. He likes looking at them like that. They make a nice couple. And he likes that they're happy. It would've been worse if they weren't.

"Hope he brings his flamethrower," Steve says wearily.

Without the cushioning shelter of adrenaline and fear, he's very tired and very sore. He seems to have strained a couple of muscles pulling himself up on the shed, and scraped his palms on the edges of the roof. And he's pretty sure he got himself in the calf with the nailbat, which feels _awesome._ He's going to need to disinfect that, especially given what he was doing with the bat earlier.

"Where's your first-aid kit?" he asks Jonathan quietly as they enter the house.

"Bathroom. Are you hurt?" Jonathan looks alarmed. Nancy does, too.

"Just scraped up. You?"

"Little bit, yeah."

"Sit," Nancy orders Steve, pushing him down on the couch while Jonathan goes to get the first-aid supplies. Steve wonders if it's that obvious how shaky he is. It must be, from the way she's acting: like he's fragile. Breakable.

Jonathan sits down beside him on the couch with the first-aid kit and Nancy goes around turning on lights. "You want to make us all something hot to drink?" Jonathan asks her. "Tea or coffee or something? I've got this."

Nancy looks surprised, and more than a little puzzled, but she goes. Steve gives Jonathan a look that's equally puzzled, and for some reason that makes Jonathan duck his head with a shy grin, which makes Steve's chest do a thing.

"Where are you hurt?" Jonathan asks, lowering his head and opening the first-aid kit.

"Uh, hands, I guess. Leg." Steve winces as he peels the sticky denim off his wounded calf, pulling up his jeans leg. He doesn't think it's bad, mostly just scraped, but it's bleeding and it hurts. "What about you?"

"Scraped up my palms a little."

"Hey," Steve says, trying for humor. "We match."

Jonathan doesn't smile at that. He just gets out gauze and ointment. "You haven't asked me," he says with his eyes still turned down to his work, "what I was doing in the woods around where you were."

"I figure you were doing exactly what I was doing, and you heard me yelling for help. Isn't that what happened?" He accepts a sharp-smelling antiseptic wipe from Jonathan, and breath hisses out between his teeth as he cleans the cuts on his leg.

"It's sort of what happened."

Before Jonathan can explain this cryptic remark, Nancy comes back from the kitchen with a bowl of warm water and a cloth. "I don't know if anyone's hurt bad enough to need this, but -- oh, Steve, your _leg."_

"It looks worse than it is," Steve says, hoping that's true. "So if you didn't hear me yelling for help, where'd you come from, anyway -- ow!" He sucks in a breath as Nancy's wet cloth makes contact with his torn flesh.

"Sorry," Nancy murmurs.

Jonathan is quiet, chewing his lip, and then he reaches for Steve's hand, turns it up in his, and starts cleaning the cuts.

Steve makes himself relax into it. It's a very odd feeling, having them both taking care of him like this. In spite of the physical pain, it's also ... nice. He studies Jonathan's face, the downcast eyes with sandy lashes, the fall of Jonathan's longish hair. It's easier than looking at Nancy, whose face he has studied up close until he knows it better than his own. Jonathan's angular features are halfway unfamiliar, but still pleasant to rest his eyes on.

Lulled into a peaceful state halfway to dozing by his own exhaustion and their gentle, ministering hands, Steve doesn't realize what Jonathan's about to do until the gentle fingers move from his palm to the band of his watch and slide it up his arm.

"Hey!" Steve jerks his hand away, jolting back to reality. Nancy, startled, looks up from pressing a gauze pad to his calf. Jonathan, too, has pulled back his hand as if he's been burned.

"Sorry," Jonathan says softly. "I didn't meant to ... sorry."

"That's personal," Steve snaps, folding the stinging palm of his other hand over his wrist. He can't even say why he's so upset.

"I'm sorry," Jonathan says again. "It's just that ..." He hesitates and then pulls up his own watch -- Nancy gives a small gasp -- and holds his hand out.

Steve knows that mark very well. He ought to. He's been looking at it in the shower for months, in that exact same part of his wrist.

"What the hell," Steve breathes. "I thought ..." But Nancy _said_ her mark matched Jonathan's. Did she _lie?_ And what -- no -- he can't match with Jonathan, that doesn't make any sense, if he was going to match with anyone it should be Nancy --

"Nancy," Jonathan says quietly, "show him yours."

"But ..." Nancy begins. She hesitates at the conviction in Jonathan's face, and then she tentatively holds out her hand, wrist upturned, the pale skin usually hidden by her watch band exposed.

It matches.

Steve can only stare. And then, slowly, he unpeels his fingers from his wrist and holds it out. The imprint of his fingertips make a pattern of red roses around the mark, the one that is identical in every way to the mark on Nancy's wrist, the one on Jonathan's.

There is a long, long silence. His fingers are curled loosely, the knuckles resting against Nancy's, with the side of Jonathan's hand resting lightly against both of theirs.

Then Steve springs to his feet, jerking his hand away, so abruptly he nearly overturns Nancy's bowl of water.

"Steve?" Nancy says, alarmed. Jonathan is just looking at him with wide eyes.

"I can't, I don't --" He backs away, eyes wide. The only other time he's ever felt like this was when something from another dimension tore through the ceiling and dropped into the middle of his ordinary, everyday, small-town life. It's that feeling of things _shredding_ , of everything he thought he knew about the world disintegrating around him. "I have to --" he says, and then he turns and stumbles blindly through the door.

He doesn't know where he's going. They came here in Nancy's car. She's got the keys. And the woods are full of monsters, but ... he just needs to go somewhere that isn't here.

 

*

 

Nancy doesn't move for a minute, staring at the door that Steve didn't close behind him. Night wind comes into the Byers house. She can hear Steve's footsteps crunching on the gravel, getting fainter and farther away.

"That's, uh ...." Jonathan gives a tiny little laugh without any humor in it. "At least he didn't hit me?"

"He wouldn't," Nancy says absently, staring at the door. "Not anymore."

"Maybe I shouldn't have said anything. It's just ... I don't think you were there for me, Nance. Or at least not just me."

Nancy turns to look up at him. She's still crouched beside the couch, her hand in Jonathan's lap, his wrist next to hers. "What do you mean?"

"I came because of Steve. It's just like you said, that feeling where you know there's something terrible about to happen and you know you have to get there. I was taking pictures in the woods for the Chief, and suddenly my brain flipped out. I'd only been in that field for ... minutes, when you got there. Seconds, maybe." He smiles a little. "Everything happened so fast. It's hard to say exactly. But not long, not nearly long enough for you to drive all the way from your house."

She looks at the open door again.

"I can go after him," Jonathan says, and starts to get up.

Nancy puts her hand on his knee. "No. It should be me. I think he'll take it better, coming from me." She wasn't lying earlier, she knows Steve's changed, but she also doesn't want to find out how far they can push it when he's this much on edge.

She kisses Jonathan and leaves the house.

She thinks she'll have trouble finding Steve, but he's actually just at the bottom of the Byers' driveway. He's stopped, studying the dark trees. He looks back when Nancy comes up behind him.

"How many more of those things do you think are out there?" he asks, scanning the trees.

"I don't know. There can't be a _lot_ of them, or more people in town would have noticed something." 

"In _this_ town?"

There's a little smile on his face, brief but there, and it makes her laugh. He's always been able to make her laugh. "Yeah, that's a good point."

She hesitates, and then cautiously moves up beside him, even more cautiously leans against him. He is still for one brief moment, she can feel how much he _wants_ \-- and then he steps quickly away, putting some space between them.

Maybe she should have had Jonathan come too. It might have been easier with all three of them. With her and Steve, there's such a complicated history, so much love and pain.

Steve is rubbing his wrist again, passing his thumb over the soft place on the inside of his wrist where the mark lives, on all of them. "What's it mean, Nancy?" he asks quietly without looking at her. "Some people at school say that it's a ... sex thing. I know you've been asking questions about it. What do you think?"

"I think it is for some people," she tells him. "But maybe not for everyone. Some people don't even have one. Some people ... I think it just means they're tangled together somehow. That they'll always be part of each other in some deep and lasting way."

She senses she's said the wrong thing when Steve just stares off into the woods for a minute and then says, in a flat voice, "Is that all? Tangled together, whether we want it or not?"

Nancy takes her time answering; she senses that a lot hinges on the answer. "I've never talked to anyone," she says at last, "who doesn't love the person who shares their mark."

To some extent it's a white lie, because there are plenty of unmatched kids at school who just don't _know_ , and it's not a question she specifically asked most of the people she talked to. 

But ...

But it's not technically untrue. And from Steve's sharp intake of breath, she guesses that he understands exactly what she's saying ... without quite saying it. He turns to face her, and she wishes it wasn't so dark out here, wishes she'd stopped to pick up a flashlight so she could see the expression on his face.

"You said you didn't," he says, his voice so quiet it's nearly lost in the soft rustle of the wind in the trees.

There are a lot of things she could say to that. _I was confused; I was hurt; I was scared and angry. I'd never been in love. I don't know what it feels like. I still don't. I don't know why things are so simple for you. I'm not like that._

But there had been a lot of things he could have said to her, too, at the Byers' shed the last time they'd actually talked about this, months ago. And all he'd said was: _Go. It's okay._

_Just go._

And she holds out a hand, the one with the mark, and simply says, "Come back inside? It's cold out here."

They hold hands all the way up the driveway, but Steve lets go before Nancy opens the door. Which is, she thinks, probably for the best, because ... _Jonathan._ She doesn't know how to deal with Jonathan in any of this.

Why couldn't things just be easy?

When they come inside, Jonathan, still on the couch, looks up from carefully picking splinters out of his palms with a pair of tweezers. And Nancy realizes that she's not sure how to have the conversation they need to have, not with Steve here. "I'm going to ... tea," she says, and flees to the kitchen, where she finds the water boiling away; at least she'd had the foresight to lift the flap on the spout and prop it up beforehand so it won't whistle.

She makes three cups of tea in Mrs. Byers' oversized mugs. While it steeps, she leans on the sink. She can hear the boys' voices coming in quietly from the living room. That's a good sign, isn't it? They haven't killed each other yet.

She looks down at her hand, flexes it and watches the tendons stand out in her wrist, shifting the mark and changing its shape. Somehow it's less strange to think that she and Steve might share one, than to think of Steve and Jonathan being bound in that way. If she and Steve have little in common, he and Jonathan have nothing at all.

The sound of a soft laugh comes in from the living room. Nancy takes a step back to peek through the open doorway at the sliver of the couch that she can see from here. They're sitting close together, and Steve is helping Jonathan bandage his hands, his dark head bent over his work. She's not sure whose laugh it was, but Jonathan is smiling one of his shy smiles.

She ducks quickly out of sight and takes her time taking the teabags out and putting a little sugar in each cup. Then she gathers them up carefully, fingers of one hand looped through two handles with the bottoms of the mugs resting on her forearm, and takes them into the living room. "Room service," she says with a quick smile.

Jonathan is just gathering up the scattered first-aid supplies, moving carefully with his lightly bandaged hands; Steve is handing him things. Jonathan takes the kit back to the bathroom while Nancy sits beside Steve and gives him a cup of tea. Jonathan comes back and stops, and Nancy realized that she didn't leave any space between her elbow and the arm of the couch -- Jonathan is going to have to sit on Steve's other side. She's about to get up when Jonathan sits back where he was, and now here they all are, on the couch.

"Tea," Nancy says, leaning across Jonathan to give him the cup. "It's hot."

"Hot sounds really good right now."

They drink tea in a very tired silence, and after a little while, Steve reaches up to pull down a blanket crumpled on the back of the couch. Nancy takes one edge, Jonathan takes the other, and after some tugging and rearranging it's draped around all three of them.

Nancy toes off her shoes so she can tuck her feet under herself.

"I can drive your car back for you, if you want to sleep here tonight," Jonathan suggests, looking kind of tense under the blanket.

"And walk back?" Steve says.

"No, I don't want to explain to my parents that I spent the night over here." She could probably come up with a convincing lie, but she's too tired right now to think of one. "Or explain to your mom either, for that matter."

Jonathan grimaces. "Yeah."

And then there's more tired silence, while Nancy thinks about getting up to leave, and thinks about how warm she is under the blanket, and how solid Steve is up against her ... and how much she missed the feeling of him, that rock-solid solidity, very different from Jonathan. And she's not entirely sure when Jonathan reached across Steve's lap to take her hand; it just seems like it's always been that way. Maybe she's really too tired to be driving home right now.

"I think," she says, yawning, "maybe I should take a quick nap before I drive home, so I don't ... you know ... go off the road or something."

 

*

 

Steve jolts awake at the soft click of the door closing. He wakes with a rush of adrenaline, and it takes him a moment to figure out where he is, particularly since he has two warm, breathing people draped on either side of him, using him as a living pillow.

And Chief Hopper is staring at him from just inside the Byers' front door, frozen in the act of taking off his hat.

"Uh ... hi?" Steve says sheepishly, and quietly, because Nancy and Jonathan are both still deeply asleep and he doesn't want to wake them.

"Hi," the Chief remarks dryly. He walks past them into the kitchen, and comes out a moment later with a beer. "Well, this explains what I was wondering when I found your car abandoned out by the Muller place."

"Sorry," Steve says. "I thought Nancy told you on the radio."

"She hit the high points." The Chief's curious gaze sweeps over their blanket-wrapped tangle as he cracks the beer open. "Seems she might've left a few things out."

Nancy wakes up suddenly at the snap and hiss of the beer can tab, with an indelicate little snort that Steve finds hopelessly endearing. "Hi," she says, to no one in particular. "Aargh. Pfeh." She wipes the corner of her mouth, which makes Steve notice that his sleeve is damp. Both sleeves: Jonathan is drooling on him too. 

He honestly doesn't mind a bit.

"Hey, welcome back," he tells her. It comes out very soft and fond. He's glad Jonathan wasn't awake to hear that.

Nancy makes a face at him and then rubs her eyes. "What time is it? No ... don't answer. I have to get home." She starts to get up, gets tangled in the blanket, and sits down abruptly in Steve's lap -- which wakes up Jonathan, who makes a startled choking sound.

"Anyone need a ride anywhere?" the Chief asks. He leans a hip against the armchair next to the couch and looks terribly amused by it all.

"No -- no." Nancy is more coherent now, her quick thoughts snapping back into place. It's fascinating; Steve can watch her brain waking up, see her eyes sharpening as she gets up. "Steve, I can drop you off if you want. Or did you want to spend the night here?"

"No ... no, I should get home too." Steve's side has a cold Nancy-shaped place where she used to be, and he doesn't really want to get out from under the blanket, but it'd be a lot more comfortable to spend what remains of the night in an actual bed than on the couch. Jonathan still looks half asleep, so Steve tilts Jonathan into the warm place he and Nancy left behind on the couch, and covers him up with the blanket.

He looks over to find that Nancy has stopped in the act of gathering up their half-empty tea cups and is just watching them, her face soft.

"What?" he says, a little defensively.

Nancy shakes her head and takes the cups into the kitchen.

Steve looks up helplessly at Hopper.

"Sorry, kid," the Chief says, and takes a drink of his beer. "You're on your own."

 

*

 

The chilly night air helps clear some of the lingering fog out of Steve's brain as he walks with Nancy to her mom's car. Although they're not touching now, he can still feel her pressed against his side, soft yet sinewy in that distinctly Nancy way. Jonathan feels kind of similar, come to think of it. Not that he ever thought he'd wonder what it felt like to cuddle with Jonathan Byers. Or expected that it would be pretty nice. He'd like to do it more, if they'll let him.

Nancy looks a little more awake, but she keeps the window cracked for the flow of fresh air. She turns on the radio, makes a faint "ugh" sound, and switches it from an easy listening station to one playing top 40 pop.

"Can you drop me off at my car, instead of my house?" Steve asks, breaking the silence. 

"Yeah, okay."

There's silence then, filled only with the rush of wind outside the car and the radio playing low. It's somehow a companionable sort of silence, though. Not like their tense, awkward silences that had become a mainstay of their relationship before their breakup.

But this an easy kind of silence. Simple, almost, in a way they've never been, no matter how much Steve tried to act like they were. He remembers how they used to be able to be quiet together like this. Just studying, the two of them, in the library or Nancy's living room. Or him watching a game on TV and Nancy lying with her head in his lap, reading a book.

His heart gives a great, clenching pang, and it seems like something in his wrist twinges along with it. He misses her like breathing, sometimes.

Nancy pulls up alongside his car. "We're here," she says, unnecessarily.

"Yeah. Thanks."

But he doesn't get out. They look at each other in the glow of the instrument panel of her mom's car. And Nancy leans over, very suddenly, to kiss him right on the corner of his mouth. Not quite on the lips.

"See you at school," she says, with a quick flash of a smile.

Steve steps out, dazed. There's a faint but distinct stench of burned plastic in the air, which he recognizes as the smell of something having been recently burned with diesel or gasoline. Nothing seems to be smoldering, though, and all the buildings on the farm are intact. He wonders how the Chief plans to explain all of this to the Mullers.

Nancy waits until he starts up his car and turns on the headlights, a streak of protectiveness he didn't expect from her. Then she pulls around him, inexpertly turns the station wagon around in the middle of the road, and takes off for town. He follows her taillights until she peels away on Elm, and he continues on to sneak into a quiet house and slip into a lonely bed.

 

*

 

Steve doesn't see them all day at school. But when he heads out to the parking lot after team practice, hair tousled and wet from the shower, and fresh from getting chewed out by Coach about missing practice (and it's not like there's much he can say; he can't explain that he was out in the woods hunting monsters instead) -- he slows to a stop at the sight of Nancy and Jonathan sitting on the hood of his car, eating a package of cookies and laughing over something.

They're gorgeous like this, backlit by the low sun. Beautiful and perfect, two halves of a whole. He would say there was no room for him, except they're _here_ , waiting for him, and when they look up and smile at him, those smiles say _Come._

So he does.

"Isn't your car here?" he asks when Jonathan slides into the front seat and Nancy, giggling, climbs in on his lap.

"Yeah, you can drop me off back at the parking lot later."

"And we're going where?" Steve asks.

Nancy, her knees doubled up to fit on Jonathan's lap, says, "Where do you want to go?"

He ends up driving to the lake. There's a turnoff he knows that goes down to a quiet patch of sand, with trees leaning over the water and old fire rings on the beach. He used to take girls here, back in the day. He can't remember if he ever came here with Nancy.

He parks on the sand and cranks down the window. The weather is mild, the sort of warm spring day that carries promises of summer's heat to come. Steve has half a pack of cigarettes in the glove box -- Nancy has to open her door and swing her legs out of the way so he can get to it -- and he lights one up and they pass it around, trying not to drop ashes on Steve's seats. The new leaves rustle in the tree branches overhead, and the sun slowly sets in a blazing sky across the lake.

The cigarette tastes like Nancy's fruit-flavored lip gloss. Steve inhales shallowly and passes it to Jonathan, who takes it with a warm brush of his fingers and touches it to his lips ... where Steve's lips were, a moment before.

It's a circle. They're a circle. And somehow he's not surprised, can't be surprised, when Nancy leans over and kisses him lightly. Fruity lip gloss and smoke.

It feels like coming home.

Then she turns to kiss Jonathan as she takes the cigarette from his fingers, and Steve catches himself bracing for a hollowness in his chest that never comes. Instead it's the same feeling as when he saw them on the hood of his car, a captivated feeling, as if he could watch them forever, the softness of Nancy's lips on Jonathan's and his lips on hers, the way her fingers dance through his hair.

He's aroused and in love and he could sit here forever, just watching.

Nancy breaks the kiss with a little pop and taps the ash off the cigarette onto the sand. "You two want to give it a go?" she asks, and there's a flirty little hint of eagerness threaded through the words.

Jarred out of a pleasant haze, Steve meets Jonathan's startled gaze. And then he thinks, why not? It's just the three of them. No one's going to know. He knows by now that the warmth in his chest isn't just for Nancy.

He's kissed plenty of girls -- heck, he's kissed plenty of girls in this very car, in this very spot. The moves are familiar, at least: curling his fingers around the base of Jonathan's skull, drawing him forward so their lips can meet, dry and chaste and light.

It's Jonathan's hand on the side of his face that he doesn't expect, the long delicate fingers, bigger than a girl's.

It's the softness that's a surprise, the gentleness. If he's thought about it at all (and okay, he has, occasionally, with some of the boys from the basketball team) he would have thought kissing a boy would be competitive and aggressive, a clash of teeth and tongues.

But this isn't; Jonathan isn't. His lips part under Steve's, and it's not so different from kissing a girl at all -- not different because every girl _is_ different, and this is just ... kissing Jonathan.

When he pulls back, Jonathan looks stunned and happy, and his hand runs lightly over Steve's face before it drops away.

Nancy flicks the half-smoked cigarette away onto the sand so she can lay down in their laps, stretched across Jonathan, sprawling onto Steve, and her fingers reach up to tangle in his hair and there's nowhere he'd rather be than this.

 

*

 

**Epilogue**

 

They're hanging out in Nancy's room, looking through Jonathan's photos under the pretext of studying. The door is open, but the fact that there are three of them instead of two seems to have done a lot to assuage her parents' fears about Nancy spending time in close proximity with a boy. Apparently the addition of an extra boy is what takes it from "Danger! Parental alert!" to "study group."

If they only knew.

Some of the photos are recent ones from Jonathan's personal projects: the pitch of a roof against a black-and-white sunset sky, the spokes of a bicycle tire in close focus with blurred grass beyond. Some are from Nancy's soulmark-cataloguing project, sorted into tidy stacks.

"Hey," Steve says, holding up a photo of someone's wrist. "This matches one of your older ones, doesn't it? It's on top of one of those piles over there."

"Does it?" Jonathan reaches for the indicated pile. "Huh. You're right. How'd you remember that?"

"Looks like the Olympic logo," Steve says absently, oblivious to the fondly amused/exasperated look Nancy and Jonathan share behind his back. He flips it over. "You don't put names on them?"

"Of course not," Nancy says. Her book is open in her lap, but she's not sure if there's any point in trying to actually study with these two here. "That'd be an invasion of privacy." She looks at the photo Jonathan is holding. The mark is three linked rings -- she can see why it reminded Steve of the Olympics -- but it's the charm bracelet next to it that rings a faint bell of memory for her. "That's Charlene Winters, I think." She remembers Charlene mainly because there's something Barb-like about her that tugs painfully at Nancy's chest: a lonely freshman with glasses, sitting alone in the cafeteria, looking pathetically grateful when Nancy sat down with her to talk.

"How 'bout mine?" Steve asks, waving his photo.

"I don't know," Jonathan says. "That could have been Harry Becker from third period English."

"Are they dating?"

"Charlene definitely isn't --" Nancy claps her mouth shut and then says firmly, "No. No, we are not running some sort of _matchmaker_ service. Absolutely not."

Steve delicately slides Charlene's photo out of Jonathan's hands and stacks it with the other. "Why not? Where's the harm in just pointing them out to each other?"

"Where to begin?" Nancy says, exasperated. "What if they hate each other? What if he breaks her heart? What if he's already got a girlfriend and we're about to --"

Steve silences her with a kiss, and as he pulls back she sees the little spark of wonder in his eyes, the way he still can't quite believe that he gets to do this. "I hope," she says firmly, licking the taste of his lips off her own, "that you don't think that means you won this argument."

"Jonathan, back me up here."

"I think it's a terrible idea," Jonathan says.

"Thank you, I -- wait, what?"

"It's none of our business," Jonathan says, snatching the photos back.

Steve reaches for the uncategorized pile and holds it up, fanning out the photos. "As opposed to this?"

Jonathan blushes to the tips of his ears. "We _asked_ first."

"We could ask! It'd be like a graduation present. 'Hi, I'm just a concerned citizen who would like to introduce you to your soulmate --"

Nancy rolls her eyes and looks up from her textbook. "Could you not use that word?" 

"Soulmate," Steve says, rolling it around in his mouth. "Soooooulmate." He flops down with his head in Nancy's lap, on top of her book, and holds Charlene's photo up to the light.

"What are you, a cat?" She makes some minimal effort to dislodge him and then props the book on his forehead. "I refuse to believe there's something destined about these ... these tattoos or whatever they are. You make your own destiny. Look at the Chief and Jonathan's mom."

"Whatever you say, soulmate." Steve props the photo on his chest where he can see it under the edge of Nancy's book. "Why would you have the Olympic symbol on your wrist, anyway? You think she's gonna be an Olympic figure skater someday or something?"

She is never, ever going to memorize important dates in British history at this rate. "It doesn't necessarily _mean_ anything," Nancy protests, and pushes up her sleeve. "I mean, look at ours. It's just a ... thing."

Steve looks up at her, baffled. "What d'ya mean? It's a bat with nails, and then rosebushes or something wrapped around the outside."

The other two stare at him. 

"What?" Steve says blankly. "I thought it was obvious!" He looks down at his wrist, suddenly unsure. "Isn't it?"

Now Nancy is staring at hers. It ... _could_ be a bat full of nails, at that. Which seems weirdly specific.

But, well ... come to think of it ... if you were going to look for a symbol to represent the three of them, you could do worse than that stupid bat.

She'd supplied it in the first place, after all. Jonathan had pounded the nails in. And Steve seems to have adopted it as his personal weapon. (It's actually in the trunk of his car right now.)

... It makes sense. A _lot_ of sense. Enough to make her worry all over again about where these symbols _came_ from, what alien intelligence put them there, what they mean, what kind of price they're going to exact someday.

"Earth to Nancy," Jonathan says softly, and she realizes the conversation has moved on; Jonathan has stolen back the photo and is now sitting on it, while Steve swipes at him halfheartedly without budging from her lap.

And she knows now that she couldn't love them more if she tried (four months of staying apart from Steve just made her realize how much she _didn't_ want to be apart from Steve; and if the world says she has to choose, that she can't date two boys at once, fuck that). For now, she's not going to worry about what these symbols mean or where they came from. She's never been good at not worrying about the future, at enjoying what she has in the moment, but ...

But it wouldn't be the biggest change any of them have gone through in the last year. As Jonathan leans in to kiss her, with Steve warm and heavy in her lap, she thinks that maybe she can learn.


End file.
